The 4 Fundamentals of a Good Mix (with Dan Worrall)

the secret to a good mix is probably much simpler than you think in this video Dan Worrell will go through the four essential elements that every great mix has in common if you like audio universities videos you'll definitely want to check out Dan's Channel I'll leave a link in the description below [Music] hi and first of all big thanks to Kyle for inviting me to guest on his channel my name is Dan and you might recognize my voice from official products demos and tutorials that I've made for various different plugin developers over the years I also have my own channel where I review plugins and talk about whatever interests me which tends to be Advanced Tweaky techniques like parallel filtering or mid-side processing tricks and I'm here to tell you now that most of them won't help you get a good mix my guess I should explain that I'm going to use a question I got from a viewer as a way into the topic the question was about how buses differ on Hardware consoles compared to a Daw I answered accordingly then got a follow-up question yes but how many buses do you get turns out they were worried that their mixes sound bad because they're using too many they have a template full of YouTuber tricks and techniques and were afraid that this was degrading the sound I haven't heard any of their mixes but I can guarantee the issue is not too many buses in reality if a mix sounds bad it's always because the basics are not right those Tweaky YouTuber tricks and techniques won't help you get a good mix together and I'm including my own they might when used appropriately help to elevate a good mix to a great mix but the good mix is a prerequisite and you get to that by fixing the fundamentals balance EQ Dynamics ambience better get the basics right for a better mix easy let's have a little chat about each of those now back in my live sound days there was a perennial question asked of Me by punters when I was running front of house especially back when we were using huge analog consoles with real pots instead of touch screens do you actually know what all those knobs and buttons do the question came up so often it was kind of a joke among front of house engineers and my answer would vary depending on how stressed and harassed I was feeling after a difficult sound check they might get a Curt yes that's my job if I was feeling more relaxed it might be having a clue mate but got away with it so far joking aside however there was one set of controls that I think most people understood the faders are the volume controls right push up the fader with a guitar scribbled underneath and the guitar will get louder this seems so obvious and intuitive that for most people it doesn't need explaining it wasn't always so the first consoles used rotary pots or switches to control volume someone had to actually invent the linear fader as we know it today and that the one was Tom Dowd but his implementation wasn't quite as we know it it was inverted pushing the fader up as we would call it today would make the signal quieter not louder that might seem weird and counter-intuitive to us but it's not as mad as it initially seems consider the precedent first organs traditionally use drawbars to control the levels of different partials and you pull these out towards you to make them louder or push them back in to make them quieter the configuration has a particular advantage in a broadcast context as you're guaranteed never to accidentally open up a channel by leaning your elbow on the console but the main reason Tom doubt configured it this way around and the reason I'm mentioning it now is because he felt that was the more intuitive arrangement pulling the fader towards you makes the part louder which pulls that part towards you in the mix and conversely pushing the fader away from you pushes that part further into the background of course it wasn't that much further back in time when recordings would be made using a single microphone or single horn and the balance between Parts would be determined by physically moving the musicians forward or backwards to change their relative distance from the transducer so perhaps it felt more natural to mimic this relationship with the fader travel back in those days and perhaps we need to be reminded of this relationship the faders determine the front to back depth of your mix and are the single most important factor if you don't have a good balance you don't have a good mix so what do I mean by a good balance first of all I definitely don't mean getting all the meters to read the same level your Daw meters probably show Peak levels those are important when you're tracking to show you how close you are to clipping but pretty much irrelevant otherwise they tell you almost nothing about how loud Your Parts sound if you match Peak levels for every channel your drums will be inaudible and the distorted guitar will totally obliterate everything else [Music] okay then you might respond I saw a video about gain staging using Vu meters so I'll just use those instead right wrong first of all there's nothing magic about Vu meters yes they average out signal levels to some degree and they represent loudness a bit better than Peak meters but they still kind of suck and won't help you with your balance so RMS metering then is that the answer well it's an improvement in the sense that RMS levels do track perceived loudness quite well if you set every channel to have the same RMS levels they should be reasonably well matched in terms of loudness and sound roughly the same volume likewise if you use the modern loudness meter and measured lufs instead of RMS but this is not what I mean by a good balance at least not necessarily perhaps sometimes you'll need every element of a mix to be equally present and significant but usually you don't let's remember that most people are not musicians and certainly not audio Engineers even if you're early and you're producing an engineering Journey your ears will likely be much better trained and refined than the average fan who I believe perceives music as singing with some exciting stuff behind it perhaps in your case the focal point is not a vocal but some other part instead that's fine but that part should probably be mixed firmly up front and prominent just as they would probably be up front and center stage for the live show if your listeners clear signposts as to what they should be focusing on by controlling the front to back depths of your mix with the faders it's important to note that as simple as it seems setting a good balance is a skill that needs to be learned and will improve with practice typical beginner mistakes include vocal too quiet remember that it's easier to reduce the front to back depth of a mix with compression than to do the opposite so probably better to ER on the side of too much lead vocal than the other way around drums too quiet I wonder if people are misled by the peak meters into thinking the drums are too loud and turn them down despite what they're hearing get those beats nice and loud and make your listeners want to shake their booties and finally bass part too loud yes I know you want to hear a really solid deep bass but you don't achieve that by cranking the bass part up loud rather by making sure that nothing is competing with it in those solid deep bass frequency ranges and that brings me to the second basic building block of a good mix EQ yes EQ can be used to mitigate or correct mistakes made when recording that's perfectly valid EQ can also be used creatively to shape the tone of a part to your liking without regard to what is correct also perfectly valid but there's a much more fundamental and vital application when it comes to mixing which we can think of as simply an extension of the First Fundamental EQ lets us control the balance of each different frequency band of the mix independently we can ensure that around 50 or 60 hertz the balance is dominated by the kick drum with the low fundamental of the bass guitar sitting behind it but we can reverse that up at 100 Hertz and sit the base in front of the kick for that frequency range and in doing so we can stop those parts interfering with one another and keep them both clearly audible at the same time there are two important points to grasp to understand why we need to do this first of all all the different elements we're mixing together end up as one stereo waveform all the separation between Parts is an illusion created inside the listener's head and second if there's something loud happening at a specific frequency you won't be able to hear quieter elements at or near that frequency this is known as frequency masking so as mix Engineers we need to make it easy for The Listener to decode as the waveform and separate it into its component parts if the most important frequencies of each instrument are mixed in front of the other elements while the less important frequencies are tapped behind the mix will have Clarity and separate which will be easy to distinguish each different part it'll be a pleasure to listen to but if the important frequencies of sum or all the parts are masked by the less important frequencies of other parts your mix will be cluttered and Confused your listener will strain to try to separate the parts and make sense of what they're hearing and might not succeed at all I like to think of it as weaving Parts together for a part to be clearly audible it needs to poke through the mix in at least one place if your bass guitar part for example is the loudest element at say 100 Hertz you'll be able to hear it clearly and it will provide a solid low fundamental for the mix if that's the only place it pokes through the mix however it'll seem very warm and soft because all the aggressive frequencies are higher than that and if you want a part to seem big it will probably need to poke through the mix in more than one place for an aggressive flea style slap bass part you'll probably need to make sure that the bass weaves back to the front of the mix around for 2K or 2K5 region for the kick drum you might want this to dominate down at 50 hertz but then thread it behind the other elements for most of the mid-range and bring it back to the front for the clicky region around 405k if our brain hears the Deep 50 hertz thump clearly and the aggressive 5K click clearly it will link those two and perceive it as a huge powerful kick occupying all the region in between important to note that while I'm saying those two frequencies are the important ones for the kick that doesn't mean you should totally remove everything else doing that is likely to break the illusion and just sound weird rather use the EQ to gently push those less important frequencies behind the other elements but allow The Listener to still get little glimpses of that thread in the background so they understand that it's all one big kick drum and a quick disclaimer the numbers I quote here are just examples while they are fairly typical the important frequencies might be different for your mix I'm definitely not saying that 50 hertz and 5 kilohertz will always be the most important kick frequencies final point about EQ again it takes practice more specifically you need to train your ears to recognize different frequencies I've talked about that recently on my own channel however so I won't repeat myself instead let's move on to Dynamics I want to split them into two separate Concepts macrodynamics and microdynamics acrodynamics are what classical musicians mean when they use the term Dynamics the difference between loud and quiet a very Dynamic piece would be something that has very quiet pianissimo sections and also very loud fortissimo sections in a mixed context the main way we manipulate macrodynamics is through volume automation and there are two main reasons to do this first of all you might just need to correct excessive Dynamics in the performance especially something like a vocal part but second we can change the balance for different parts of the mix for Creative reasons we can think of this as simply an extension of the first principle once again rather than setting one static balance for the whole song we can optimize the balance for each section rather than just sign posting what's important you can give your listeners a guided tour perhaps a part needs to be a little louder the first time it comes in to grab the listener's attention and establish itself clearly what can then sit back a little later on in the song When some other part needs to be the focus thank you foreign of course a good arrangement will address most of those issues in other ways for example the first time that part comes in you can simply ensure there's nothing else going on that competes put some sympathetic volume automation can greatly enhance a good arrangement and can make a song much more engaging and easy to listen to especially for the first time alright so what about microdynamics this is what mix or mastering Engineers might be referring to when discussing Dynamics depending on the context if a mastering engineer refers to a mix as very dynamic they might mean it has a high peak to average ratio that the transients are very prominent acoustic drums naturally have a very high peak to average ratio so our natural and minimally processed recording of a drum kit will tend to be very dynamic in microdynamic terms but if the drummer pounds away with the same energy for the whole song that recording could simultaneously have very little in the way of macrodynamics anyway the main tool we use to control microdynamics is compression and this is hugely important to modern pop and rock music obviously Distortion and distorted guitar amps in particular had a huge impact on modern music my now musical landscape would be radically different without it I would say that compression and compressed drums in particular have had an equally large impact but unlike Distortion which is pretty easy to hear compression is subliminal most people don't notice it consciously and this is probably part of the reason it's so effective your listener doesn't know why they just know those drummed sound like they're exploding from the speakers and they like it [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you [Music] so learning to use compression is another huge part of learning to mix modern music styles and learning to hear a compression consciously is a big part of that but there's a recent video on my own channel in which I talk about ear training strategies both for EQ and compression and there's a load of resources on this channel in my own covering specific compression techniques I'm trying to keep this video more conceptual and philosophical so I'll leave compression there and move on to my final fundamental ambience by which I mean all types of Reverb And Delay effects but especially the subliminal ones that you don't notice unless they're missing this is the first of my basic principles that isn't just really some extension of balance and it's also going to require the biggest insight into the workings of our own brains imagine this scenario you make a video recording of a musical performance it turns out well except the sound from the camera mic is much too roomy and ambient of course it is right for professional results you're going to need a separate multi-track recording and mix down which could then replace the camera audio in post but why is that the camera mic was right near your head while you were recording it didn't sound too roomy to you at the time it sounded great why is the microphone picking up so much of the room when your ears didn't the answer is kind of shocking and surprising your ears do pick up all that excess roominess just like the microphone did but your brain filters it out before you get to actually hear it as soon as you enter a room your brain starts to pick up subtle acoustic Clues and figures out what that room's Reverb characteristics are and it then subtracts those Reverb characteristics from whatever your ears pick up so you can as far as possible hear the sound as it really is the process is kind of similar to the way we see color we don't just perceive the raw data from our eyes our brain first makes a judgment about the ambient light then corrects for it and only then decides what color it's going to show you that's why under the right circumstances some people can see address as blue and black when it's actually golden White or was it the other way around anyway this Cuts right to the heart of why we need recording engineers and Studios at all we're not trying to accurately capture the sound in the room your camera mic probably did that quite well in fact we're trying to trick The Listener into hearing the sound as they would have if they were in the room there are basically two different ways to deal with the issue first of all we can record in glorious sounding rooms and that doesn't necessarily mean long and Lush sounding Reverb Tales because in fact the smaller the room the less the effect of the Acoustics is Reverb as we would normally think of it and the more it becomes a type of EQ I'm planning at some point a video for my own channel called what's the difference between Reverb and EQ and the answer to that question isn't as simple as you might expect meanwhile though consider the Acoustics of an old-school telephone booth you're probably imagining boxy resonances rather than any obvious Reverb Tale now consider the body of an acoustic guitar it's a trapped volume of air just like a room only smaller but its effect on the sound of the guitar is much more like that of an EQ than that of a Reverb so a great sounding room could mean one that doesn't skew the frequency response too much but keeps the sound relatively flat or shapes it in gently flattering ways this approach is problematic in a couple of different ways few of us have easy access to Glorious sounding rooms for a start I'm guessing the majority of you are working in some kind of home or project Studio and even fewer of us have access to a range of different glorious sounding rooms because the Acoustics that are flattering for a grand piano might not be so ideal for rock drums the other problem with this approach is recording the right amount of room the most obvious way to control the ratio between direct and reflected sound is to move the microphone closer to or further from the source but it can be very difficult to gauge this correctly on the day especially if you're tracking up parts one by one and you don't have the full context yet so the obvious solution there is to use multiple microphones Place one close to the source to pick up predominantly direct sound then Place ambient microphones to pick up predominantly reflected sound and blend them to taste later those of us that lack access to Glorious rooms are forced to take a different approach we use a close mic again to pick up mostly direct signal and then we use some kind of artificial Reverb instead of the ambient mics this is a very powerful and flexible approach but in what is becoming a theme in this video it also requires some ear training you need to become more consciously aware of Reverb especially the very short small room kind so that you can recognize when you need to add more of it to your mix it's a strange contradiction that while having Reverb burnt into a recording kind of breaks the brain's ability to remove that Reverb as it would if you were in the room having no Reflections at all in a recording usually doesn't sound good either with none of the usual spatial cues the sound seems to float in a void it seems small and lost foreign [Music] thank you [Music] foreign pop music the lead vocal is often presented very dry and upfront with no obvious Reverb but it's never actually dry a completely dry vocal will sound like it's stuck on top and disconnected from the rest of the mix in fact there will be just enough early Reflections to satisfy your brain that yes indeed that vocal is right up in your face unlike everything else it takes practice and ear training before you can nail that every time now of course there are other considerations when mixing as well as those four fundamentals I listed if I were to add a fifth it would probably be saturation and distortion but while it is certainly possible for a mix to be too clean if that's the only problem with the mix it's probably already a good mix just maybe not great yet but that's okay a good mix is already a great achievement and a great foundation on which to build a great mix this is the stage at which the Tweaky YouTuber tricks might start to make a positive difference and my final tip get to that stage as fast as you can take care of the basics first thing in your mix work quickly and don't overthink your moves they're all provisional anyway at that stage because you don't have the context of a good mix in which to judge them once you have a good mix and the basics are in place you can then make good judgments about the subtle tweaks and embellishments that might take it up another level getting to that stage quickly is not only more fun but will also invariably result in a better mix okay that's all thanks for watching and thanks again to Kyle for having me [Music]

Channel: Audio University

Views: 233,455

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Id: QSvdhuu2orQ

Length: 26min 2sec (1562 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 06 2023